Dynamics of cracks in disordered materials

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex behavior of crack dynamics in disordered materials, highlighting the limitations of traditional models and exploring phenomena like jerky crack motion and microcrack formation.

Contribution

It offers new insights into crack propagation behaviors, including jerky dynamics and microcrack formation, beyond classical elastic fracture mechanics.

Findings

Linear elastic fracture mechanics simplifies the problem but misses complex behaviors.

Jerky crack dynamics involve sudden violent events explained by statistical physics.

Fast crack emergence is linked to microcrack formation at small scales.

Abstract

Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale dynamics extremely sensitive to the microscale material disorder. This results in giant statistical uctuations and non-trivial behaviors upon upscaling dicult to assess via the continuum approaches of engineering. These issues are examined here. We will see: How linear elastic fracture mechanics sidetracks the diculty by reducing the problem to that of the propagation of a single crack in an eective material free of defects, How slow cracks sometimes display jerky dynamics, with sudden violent events incompatible with the previous approach, and how some paradigms of statistical physics can explain it, How abnormally fast cracks sometimes emerge due to the formation of microcracks at very small scales.